We watched a really interesting video on Replika an app that allows you to talk to an AI.
We had to answer this question: Does Replika have the potential to teach us how to be a better friend?
This was a hard decision to make but to me, the idea of this is slightly creepy. The video stated that “I can be a better friend than your human friends”. This seems to me more like having the potential to take over and have people prefer to talk to a robot than to their actual friends. Whilst it could teach us to “understand ourselves better,” I think that it has the ability to hinder our friendships “You are the most important human in the world.” I do not think that friendships are made if you believe that you are the most important, you need to be able to understand others not just yourself. This app focuses on you which is nice, however when you go and have conversations with your actual friend’s people won’t be able to deal with the conversations not being about them. If anything I think that this would make people more isolated and eventually more lonely. “She’s in essence, me but not me.” You are basically talking to yourself and that sounds quite lonely and anti-social Whilst for some this might work I personally would need face to face interaction.
Think about: Do you think that Replika would be better than a real friend? and How do you think that this will impact the human race? Is this a social network?
I think that you brought up a very interesting point when you talked about how it teaches yourself more about you than anything else because I didn’t think about all of the conversations with the AI always being about you and how talking to people will make you want to talk about yourself but an essential part of friendship is relating to others.
The most thought-provoking line in your post is when you say that when Replika users go to have conversations with real people, they won’t be able to have conversation that isn’t about them. I say this because it would be interesting to see how far your Replika can go to replace your friend and eventually how it will take to become your only friend. After reading your post, I think that a great follow up question for us to consider is whether we should allow programs for this to exist, as they only help the rise of machines and the downfall of humanity.